Bishop Briggs: The Tell My Therapist I'm Fine Tour

Bishop Briggs sits at the precipice of a new chapter in her already illustrious career as a singer, a songwriter, a sound-shaper, and a performer. With her third studio album, Tell My Therapist I'm Fine (out October 18th), the artist—whose songs have been streamed more than three billion times—plunges like never before into the highs, lows, and confusions she's faced over a rocky few years. The album’s darkly comic title disclaimer winks and riffs on Bishop’s powerful introspection and emotions which propel her new collection of unstoppable songs. It’s a body of work inspired by her recent past, but informed by a life steeped in music and music-making, and a record only possible at the hands of a confident and seasoned artist like Bishop Briggs.

From a young age, Bishop wore the musical traditions of the world the way most people learn to walk or ride a bike. Born in London, Bishop moved to Tokyo at age four, her parents immersing her in the sounds of artists like Aretha Franklin—the queen of soul’s voice a beacon and salve during a time of change—while honing her performance skills at the city’s karaoke bars. When she moved to Hong Kong six years later, at age 10, "the anxiety and angst came in," Briggs says. "So it was like, 'Gotta turn to Queen, gotta turn to Janis Joplin.” Those artists—and, later, bands and singers whose calling card became the Warped Tour circuit—gave her permission to find and harness release and unlocked what would later become core elements in the soulful, trademark punch of her singer-songwriter career.

Bishop moved to Los Angeles after high school, and, with her second-ever single, "River," scored multi-platinum sales and a major-label contract. Christening herself after her parents' hometown of Bishopbriggs, Scotland, she released her 2018 debut album, Church of Scars, which introduced the world to her anthemic hooks and high-energy emo catharsis. Her 2019 sophomore album, Champion, added thundering electronic and hip-hop components to the mix.

On Tell My Therapist I’m Fine, the riotous live performer commits to her formative Warped Tour inspirations, channeling the reckless velocity of heroes like My Chemical Romance and Panic! at the Disco. Bishop says that’s not unintentional, citing Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker as the catalyst who set things off when he invited her to his studio. "It was a dream come true," Briggs says of the session, which produced “Isolated Love,” one of the album's first songs. "That song gave me a lot of the emotional direction for the entire album."

Emotional direction in sight, the album needed its emotional core. Bishop found it in the form of personal reckoning: “Good for Me” revisits a moment, deep in the pandemic, when she watched her sister, manager, and best friend die of cancer at age 30. That was the moment, she says, that everything changed. "It's based on being in the hospital room with my sister, when everything seemed to just stop," she says. "Up until that point, everything we did revolved around chasing this dream and all of a sudden, none of that mattered. It was all about this person in front of me. When I started writing for this album, I found her spirit really channeling through me."

Seeking to honor that change and the space her sister still holds in her life, Bishop says much of Tell My Therapist I’m Fine tackles a split—the dismantling we all go through when change rips us apart, the “what came before” and the “what comes after.” It shows up thematically on songs like “Growing Pains,” which she wrote and recorded six months after her sister died, when she was nine months pregnant with her first child. "In a way, the song is a letter to my son, trying to describe what life can be about, what its chapters might look like,” she says. "The song is about accepting all of it: the deep, deep sorrow and the extreme joy."

Bishop found a creative partner who helped these songs and more come to life in multi-instrumentalist Andrew Wells. When the pair connected in an LA studio, they birthed a rawer, more organic sound together, blending the punkish intensity of their emo heroes with her own evolving commitments to social activism and mental-health awareness. "Mona Lisa on A Mattress” presents a gleeful, acerbic postcard from a truly bad romance. "Shut It Off" turns breathless energy into a rejection of mansplaining censors, while the Black Mirror-leaning "I'm Not a Machine” (produced by Leroy Clampett) sings the cri-de-coeur of a would-be fembot. Album closer "Undone” is a mini rock-opera, opening with a floating, torch-song verse before shifting gears a minute in and triggering a full-out gallop to the end, the refrain “I'll come undone” repeating as a kind of promise. And "Here Comes the Flood," which she wrote with John Feldman, is what she calls “a cathartic watershed.”

Ultimately, throughout Tell My Therapist I’m Fine’s nooks and crannies, its emotional highs and lows, its propulsive new sounds and emotionally walloping lyrics, Bishop says it’s the connection—to herself and to others who helped her through the fire these past few years—that convinced her that she, too, would be fine. “A reoccurring theme with anyone I wrote with on this record is people who understand the evolving, ever-changing process of grief," she says. "And there's this quote in Buddhism that talks about how every single moment we become a new person, which is actually closer to the truth than most of us realize. It's freeing to accept that you have changed, you will change, and you're changing right this second. And maybe, amid all the pain, joy, and grief of life, this is something to really embrace. You'll never fully know yourself—you'll always be learning. And sometimes, you need other people to show you the way."